Nibb31

Yes, they do static firings on a test stand. They have even blown up some AJ-27s doing it, which was already rather worrisome. Even then, individual engine tests don't protect from assembly errors or mismatch between parts. This kinds of reminds me of Ariane V36 in 1990. An Ariane 4 exploded 100 seconds into the flight because a water pipe was blocked by a piece of cloth that somebody forgot during assembly. Since that event, every cloth is numbered and tracked, and endoscopy checks are performed on the assembled engines. There is a reason why space is expensive.

I suspect that the Antares and Cygnus were insured, but the secondary payloads weren't. Things like the Arkyd and cubesats are rarely insured because they are cheap and experimental in nature.

I think that's an effect of using a tele lense. It tends to flatten the perspective, making things appear closer than they really are. At that altitude, it doesn't make much of a difference.

Same is true for Android, especially if you use Chrome as a browser on the PC.

We don't ? The main reason we don't have hovercrafts bigger than the Zubr-class is that they require so much power when most of that power is wasted by fighting gravity. The other big reason is that the tactical advantage these days is more in stealth than in speed. Indeed. You can quite easily make a Mk2 than doesn't work any better than a Mk1 iteration that doesn't work.

We have it easy on Earth. In space you have radiation, MMOD, vacuum, no convection, wild thermal variations, difficulty of repairs, the need to counter any torque, and the cost of simply getting the stuff where it needs to be and keeping it there. A few things might be easier, but most of the engineering is whole lot harder. You need oversized radiators, MMOD shielding, power, special lubricants and seals that don't outgas. Everything you take for granted on Earth has to be redesigned and moved there. And the lack of gravity is actually a PITA for engineering. Have you ever tried cleaning up dust in space? Or designing a conveyor belt? Mechanical equipment is hard to design for space because lubricants don't work properly and you have to design stuff maintain itself (clean filters, reload fluids, replace used parts...) There is a reason why space hardware is expensive. It has to be low maintenance, high reliability, and it has to work in the most extreme environment possible. Well, there are two paths that are usually mentioned by asteroid-mining proponents: - Commodities that will be consumed by a large space-based infrastructure: water, propellant, construction materials. - Stuff that is valuable enough to be brought back to Earth: gold, platinum, and other stuff. The former might be possible if anyone needs to resupply a large space-based infrastructure, but I don't see any plans for one in the next 20 years at least. The latter is not economically plausible. Valuable stuff is valuable because it's rare. If you flood the market with enough material to make it worthwhile, you crash the market and it is no longer valuable.

It was arguably the best GTA until GTA5 came along. I had a hell of a time on the PC version.

Very few, yes. Which is why I don't expect it to be tremendously profitable. However, it's a viable proposal based on existing hardware. It doesn't incur any huge costs if it hardly ever flies, because the hardware and infrastructure is the same as F9. The development cost is minimal and it doesn't cost them much to add it to their catalog for when an occasional customer comes along. ULA have similar proposals in their catalog that will never fly because there is no need for them.

I find it quite amusing how many people jump on the bandwagon "big bucks to be made is space" and who swallow everything that companies like this have been boasting about for decades. The space industry has a long history of bold new companies that are going to revolutionize space and that disappear after a few years of Powerpoint presentations and CGI. So until any of these "new space" companies actually make some money, yeah, I'll be taking their business plan they say with a healthy pinch of salt. Supply is not enough to create a market. Believe it or not, the space market is saturated. There is too much supply. The problem is that there are no customers because there is no money to be made in space. If there was a magical business model that would make space profitable, then the mega-corporations would be all over it.

If the ISS is rotating that fast, how come there are no other signs of rotation or spinning once Bullock climbs on board? And how come all the effects stop as soon as Clooney lets go. If the centrifugal force is strong enough to fling Clooney away, the spin would get worse as she approaches the CoM of the station and would be unbearable once inside. Also, all they needed to do was to pull on the rope to shift their own movement relative to the station. This would either accelerate or decelerate their own rotation around the station and the rope would have wound itself around the station like a yoyo, reeling them in.

Not when you factor in the equipment that was required to develop and launch the mining hardware or the spacecraft capable of providing the delta-v to carry tons of water from a random asteroid to a destination orbit. It will be a long time before that is cheaper than sticking 10 tons of water on something like a Cygnus or Progress. And there is no current application that demands massive amounts of water. Even if you made massive amounts of rocket fuel out of it, there are no actual customers that are currently waiting for it.

There is already a thread here.

I don't know what sort of hover technology you are envisioning (thrusters, electromagnetic, superconductors?), but I can think of all sorts of problems that make hover vehicles a bad idea. First of all, propulsion. To move your vehicle, you are going to have to push against a fluid, which means using some sort of propeller, jet engine, or rocket thruster. Those are much less efficient that using wheels, which use friction on a solid surface. The energy consumption is going to be horrendous. You are going to need to spend massive amount of energy just to keep the thing afloat versus moving it. Basically, a large part of your energy is going to be spent fighting gravity that is going to be pulling that 50 ton tank down. Then, a small part of that energy is going to have to push the tank forward. Wheels can do the same job for very little energy. As for solving your problem of parking sideways or strafing, what's wrong with pivoting wheels ?

Because it's a totally stupid idea. There are no "new" F1 engines. Steel isn't "stronger and lighter", but you would use totally different manufacturing techniques, new soldering techniques, different ribbing, 3D printing instead of forging or milling, etc... In the end, you would have to redesign every single part, rebuild half of KSC, modify the crawlers, the LUT, remodel the VAB, etc... It would be much easier to build a similar rocket using modern off-the-shelf designs and state-of-the-art technology. Which is what they are doing with SLS. Which is why most Hollywood movies suck. They lower the bar to the level of a dumb audience instead of making clever movies that might actually raise the average level of knowledge of the audience.

I don't see how this is any more decadent than rich people climbing Mount Everest, rich people buying a Bugatti Veyron, or rich people getting a ticket on Virgin Galactic or Soyuz. You people are always harping on about how "space tourism" is supposed to jump start us into a "space faring species" or whatever, yet when a rich person wants to spend his money on something like this, it's "decadent". Do you really think that space tourism would be any different?

Yes, I'd recommend a second-hand flagship phone, like a Galaxy S3 or S4, or a Nexus 4.

Of course they do. They orbit in GEO.

Seeing that Eustace made practically zero publicity around this jump, as compared to Baumgartner's jump, I wouldn't accuse him of doing it for fame. He is already pretty famous as VP of Google, so he doesn't really have anything to prove on that front.

Simply rebuilding the launch pad and LUT would be more expensive at this point than expediting SLS or sending stuff up on smaller rockets.

There would still be a risk of damaging the engines.

Of course, interpretation of teaser/trailer like this is pure speculation, but the premise of hauling a Saturn V out a museum to launch a last ditch World-saving interstellar mission is cliché Hollywood-grade stupidity. I really hope the Saturn V footage is only for a short flashback scene and not part of the actual plot, because it would instantly ruin any attempt of suspension of disbelief.

Seems a bit desperate.

Numerous pilots have been incapacitated by laser beams, causing temporary blindness or degraded visual acuity, forcing them to stop working for several days or weeks and to get medical treatment. The fact that the person is flying a airplane full of passengers isn't the crux of the matter here, it's just a aggravating circumstance. How is that any different from whacking someone's head with a baseball bat? It is assault, plain and simple. When you hurt someone voluntarily, you are prosecuted. We can't just have people going around lasering, tazing, or pepper-spraying random people just for fun, especially when those people are in charge of the safety of other people. No, but if you get on a bus and pepper-spray the driver while he's driving, you certainly should.

No it isn't. A spaceplane has zero tactical or strategic use in itself for the military. The reasons they wanted the Shuttle for military purposes in the 70's were misguided and made no sense. The only purpose of the X-37 is as a platform to research other stuff. The X-37 isn't secret, its payload is.

And what are the plants supposed to feed themselves with? Martian soil contains some of the nutrients that plants need, but not all of them. In fact, we don't know much about Martian soil, whether or not it can be used to grow plants. For all we know you might need to ship hundreds of tons of fertilizer to mix with the local regolith if you want anything to grow there. However, we do know that the soil contains high levels of perchlorate chemicals, which are pretty toxic, meaning that humans should avoid any direct contact with soil and dust.